Monitoring SLAs in an On-Demand World

If you were listening in on our Opscast webinar with Honeywell a few weeks ago you would have learned about an interesting use case of the Catchpoint OnPrem Agent. Honeywell was experiencing painfully slow satellite Internet service on its entire fleet of corporate jets, jets that include a number of Honeywell components, including the satellite communications routers that provide on-board Internet service from satellite signals.

Honeywell installed Catchpoint OnPrem Agents on its fleet of planes, its sat-com ground station and even on non-Honeywell planes that used a different satellite Internet service. The OnPrem Agents monitored network service levels from all of these measurement points and within two weeks from its first contact with Catchpoint, Honeywell got to the bottom of its crawling in-flight Internet service. The satellite spotbeam service was over-saturated at peak travel times. In this case, Honeywell’s satellite Internet service provider was indeed providing the contracted level of service, but that service wasn’t sufficient to meet Honeywell’s inflight Internet needs during peak travel times. Honeywell needed to upgrade its service.

This isn’t the textbook example of how Catchpoint’s technology helps you to monitor your SLAs, but it’s nonetheless instructive. Here the contracted service level was fine, but it turned out to not be enough to meet peak user demand. A more typical Catchpoint SLA monitoring use case has us discovering that the service provider did not provide the contracted service level. Customers have reported that Catchpoint paid for itself in as little three months after finding SLA breaches that resulted in refunds or credits from their service providers.

In today’s world of distributed, on-demand computing, relying on third parties has never been more critical to the customer experience you’re delivering. Content delivery networks, external DNS providers, ad-serving networks, software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service providers can all be a part of the final product your customers see. All add new capabilities, but also vulnerabilities that have to be managed. Holding these service providers to the service delivery commitments you’re paying them for is a crucial part of any digital performance strategy.

You need a monitoring service that can pinpoint failures and slowdowns wherever they’re occurring, simultaneously discovering where a problem exists and eliminating other causes of failures. Most of all you need to find this out fast so you can get back to running your business. Whether on the ground or in the air, Catchpoint can help you break through the noise and solve your most challenging digital performance problems.